Coming to Terms

Well, it’s been awhile, again. But honestly, I’ve been here long enough that most things seem so routine that they’re not worth blogging about. I figure you’d like to at least know what I’ve been up to, so here’s a quick rundown of the past couple months.

I spent my birthday in the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine with my training group at our Close of Service Conference. Basically Peace Corps treated us like kings and put us up in a resort and fed us awesome food and let us chill for a few days. Then I met up with some friends in the Healthy Lifestyles Working Group and we went skiing for a couple days. It was a sweet trip.

As far as I can remember, March was pretty quiet, until Mom came the first week of April. I took her and Tia, her chaperone, down to Yalta in Crimea. Except for the dreary weather, it was a great trip. I didn’t realize all the history hidden down in Crimea. Took Mom and Tia back to my site for literally a few hours and drug her through school, English club, and a dinner with some Ukrainian friends before sending them off to their own adventures in Amsterdam. Ask them about that. It’ll make you giggle.

Mattison (my sitemate) and I hosted another ultimate Frisbee weekend which was a resounding success. Then I spent Easter camping in the woods of Svyatagorsk and spent most of the night before Easter standing outside a monastery and hiking a mountain. Since then it’s been bike rides, Spring weather, numerous holidays, picnics, and dachas (Ukrainian summer houses/gardens).

Workwise, I’ve been working on a pretty large summer camp at a secondary site focused on Healthy Lifestyles. It’ll be in July so I won’t get to see the fruits of my labor, but we’ve got the whole Healthy Lifestyles Working Group working on it so I have no doubt it will be successful. That secondary site, an agricultural technical school, is pretty awesome so I convinced them to apply for a volunteer and they should be getting one this June.

I think I mentioned earlier that I wrote a grant for a journalism club at my site. Well, we got our money and bought a computer with all the trimmings, a camera, and a nice printer. Now my school has the capability to be the only school in the area that can print a newspaper, and it’s only one of three schools in the oblast with such capabilities. Believe me, they’re proud of that, and I can't help being proud too. They have definitely run with the project.

Otherwise I don’t do much of anything at school. Except for the summer camp I don’t have any outstanding projects. It’s all winding down and I can’t believe it.

I knew this time would come; the time when there’s no time left and all that’s left is reflection. It’s time to come to terms with a lot. Did I really accomplish anything? Did I do my best? Can I go home satisfied with what I did here? How are people going to remember me here? Will they remember me at all? How does this all come to play in my future? What will I do with all the relationships I’ve made that are about to be subjected to a nearly insurmountable distance? How do I make the most of the hastily receding time I have left in country? All these questions and many more are swirling in my head.

Peace Corps is nothing if not sobering. I feel like I had to fight and scrape to accomplish anything that met my definition of success at my school. So accomplishing anything seems to be something to hang my hat on. But then I start working at that agricultural technical school and accomplish as much there in one day as I do at my own school in a month. It’s hard not to look at that and think I could have accomplished so much more had circumstances been different.

But I’ve really come to appreciate that small measure of success. At least I won’t leave Ukraine feeling completely defeated. There have been times where I sit and wonder if I’m really cut out for this. But I know now how to fight and endure, and I know that when everything falls into place, I can run.

I know I’ll never be satisfied with what I did here, and that’s not a bad thing. I haven’t been satisfied since my first trip to Russia when I was 16. I’ve got this itch to be here and do something about the problems, and each subsequent trip I return with more skill which lets me do more. I know I haven’t reached my full potential yet, so that means I’ll most likely keep coming back and seeing how and where else I can be useful.

As for the future, I’m going to go to grad school to study International Relations. Somehow I got into Johns Hopkins and on top of that they are sending me to their Bologna, Italy campus to spend my first year. It’s an incredible opportunity, and by specializing in Russian and Eurasian Studies I’ll be setting myself up for a career in scratching that itch. I know this opportunity would never have been possible without doing Peace Corps in Ukraine, so that, if nothing else, makes this whole experience worth it.

Only time will tell what will happen to the relationships I’ve cultivated here, whether with Ukrainians or Americans. As my past has shown, I’ll always consider them close friends, but some will stay in close touch and make the effort to get together, while others I may never see or hear from again. And those who stay close won’t necessarily be those I’d expect.

Talking about this and what I’ll do with the remaining month and a half just makes me incredibly sad. I have impossibly mixed emotions about leaving. I miss my family, friends, and home intensely, especially since the tornado struck. But this is home too, and coming back isn’t like a trip from Ringgold to Athens. I don’t know what the future holds and if I’ll ever even get back here. Right now, just the possibility of coming back is getting me through. That’s all I got. So basically I’m just trying not to think about it, thus another reason I put off blogging.

Anyways, it’s warm finally so I’m soaking up my favorite season in Ukraine. I’ll be home at the end of June. I expect to party the entire two months or so before I head off again to Italy, so get ready.